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Interview with Gavin de Becker

Called the Slowest Pulse in Hollywood, Gavin de Becker has a cool style of executive and celebrity protection that has gained him the trust of Hollywood stars, CEOs and even U.S. presidents.

July 01, 2004 — CSO — No one had any particular reason to trust Gavin de Becker with anything, least of all their lives. He was just another poor kid at the tony Beverly Hills High School, one whose life had gotten off to a particularly violent start. At age 10, he watched his mother shoot his stepfather while his 2-year-old sister napped in her bedroom. When he was 16, his mother, a heroin addict, killed herself. It was not an auspicious way to come into adulthood.

But somehow, the charismatic de Becker used his innate understanding of why people turn violent—as well as a few well-placed connections, such as Rosemary Clooney (who took him under her wing when his mother died) and childhood friends Shaun Cassidy and Carrie Fisher—to become not just another Hollywood bodyguard, but the security guru to the stars. He doesn't like to name clients, but the friends he acknowledges in his latest book, Fear Less: Real Truth About Risk, Safety, and Security in a Time of Terrorism(a follow-up to the best-seller The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence), read like an Oscar speech: Garry Shandling, Harry Shearer, Ed Begley Jr., Michelle Pfeiffer, Oprah Winfrey and, of course, Alanis (as in Morissette, his ex-girlfriend). When George Harrison wanted to go to Los Angeles and die in peace, who else would he ask for help but his friend Gavin de Becker?

More quietly, however, de Becker has built his company, Gavin de Becker & Associates, by consulting to everyone from President Ronald Reagan to the CIA to Fortune 500 companies to prosecutors on both O.J. Simpson cases about how to prevent and manage violence. Most controversially, he developed Mosaic—a threat assessment tool used by the Supreme Court as well as police departments and schools across the country—to predict whether someone will turn violent.

Now 49, de Becker spends as much time as he can at a sprawling retreat in Fiji where he is raising seven adopted children. He does much of the management of his 100-person firm in Los Angeles by phone and e-mail, and he is also at work on a new book about how protectors can best use the average of five seconds that it takes for an assassination attempt to occur—what he describes as "a very Zen book about staying in the present."

Ever an elusive interview subject, de Becker took some time to talk with Senior Editor Sarah D. Scalet about executive protection and methods for promoting confidence in security.